A Sisyphus in the Sand

By

David Mermelstein

April 25, 2014 6:35 p.m. ET

Between 1962 and 1968, the writer Kobo Abe and the film director Hiroshi Teshigahara, friends since their student days, made four pictures together. All were adapted by Mr. Abe from his novels or plays, and three of them—"Pitfall" (1962), "Woman in the Dunes" (1964) and "The Face of Another" (1966)—came to be regarded as pillars of the Japanese New Wave. But "Woman in the Dunes" is also something else: a reminder that film at its most searching can prove a profoundly thought provoking and...